Atsugi-shi

In the most recent Population Census the population is about 224,000 (223,705 in 2020). Over the five years from 225,714 in 2015 it fell by some two thousand. It is a city of central Kanagawa that has entered a stage of slight decline.

What is worth seeing here is that the number of children is falling faster than the total. Those under 15 fell from 28,919 (2015) to 26,156 (2020), some two thousand seven hundred fewer. Over the same period the share aged 65 and over rose from 22.8% to 25.7%. Households with children make up 19.2% (2020), on the lower side even within Kanagawa compared with the coastal residential cities. The residential land price is in the 95,000-yen-per-m² range, a level held down as an inland part of central Kanagawa. And this town’s Fiscal Capacity Index is 1.15, exceeding 1.0 — this shows a self-standing fiscal structure, all but free of the local allocation tax, able to cover standard expenditure on its own tax revenue alone. It is one of the few among Kanagawa’s cities. The childcare waitlist is 0 children (2025). Why these figures take this shape cannot be read without going back to the origins of river transport and the industrial park.

Atsugi’s skeleton is the very history of transport and trade that a single river brought. The city of Atsugi lies in the center of the Sagami plain, on the plateau and alluvial plain spreading along the east bank of the Sagami River. From of old, this ground was a hub of the Sagami River crossing and river transport. As a collection-and-distribution point for timber and the like carried by the river, people and goods gathered; what economic geography calls “a trading place with a node of river transport at its core” becomes this town’s first foundation.

In the Edo period, Atsugi prospered as a post town and a center of trade, and for its bustle was called a “Little Edo.” With river transport for its backbone, it was given the character of a town where commerce and distribution gathered. It is an example, in historical geography, of the path dependence by which a node of distribution becomes a city’s core.

The other foundation is postwar industry. The mulberry fields that had spread across the Nakatsu plateau in the city’s northwest were land developed by the former military as the Sagami Army Airfield (Nakatsu Airfield) in February 1941. After the war, this whole stretch was divided into reclamation farmland, and after land-improvement works, the momentum for creating an industrial park rose. Then in 1966 the land-creation works for an inland industrial park were completed. This is an industrial park straddling the city of Atsugi and the neighboring town of Aikawa in Aiko District, laid out as a land-readjustment project accompanied by city-planning roads and block streets. A trading town that opened through river transport drew factories onto a plateau of mulberry fields — this town’s shape stands on two geographies, the river and the plateau.

What characterizes Atsugi is that, while the total population fell by two thousand, the number of children fell by some two thousand seven hundred. That children thin at a faster pace than the total is a flow common to many regional cities across the country, and Atsugi is no exception. The share aged 65 and over has passed a quarter, and the household-with-children rate stays at 19.2%. Behind the quiet figure of a slight fall in the total population, the generational makeup is surely shifting upward.

Even so, the childcare waitlist is 0 children. A reading shift is needed here. A zero waitlist in a town where the absolute number of children is falling is not, as in Urayasu, “a consequence of having supply catch up with ever-rising demand.” It reads as a zero settling at a point where, as children gently fall, the supply of childcare comes to exceed that demand. The same “zero waitlist” changes wholly in meaning depending on whether children are rising or falling behind it. A town that holds an industrial park and has a fiscal structure able to cover expenditure on its own tax revenue has a side on which it can more easily support the supply of childcare. Children falling first, aging advancing, yet the supply-demand of childcare in balance — these three running at once are the figures of a mature industrial city of central Kanagawa. Take out the single point of a zero waitlist alone, and you mistake it for the zero of a town where children rise.

Atsugi holds several functions of its own. One is its origin as a trading town that opened at a Sagami River crossing; the character of commerce and distribution, called a “Little Edo” in the Edo period, connects to the present form of a hub city of central Kanagawa. Another is the inland industrial park laid out on the Nakatsu plateau, which drew factories onto a plateau that had been mulberry fields and supports a cluster of industry generating its own tax revenue. This thickness of finances surfaces as a Fiscal Capacity Index exceeding 1.0.

Atsugi is a town where a trading town that opened through river transport grew into a city holding self-standing finances by setting an industrial park atop the plateau. From a crossing and a post town to an inland hub holding an industrial park — the condition of “the plateau and plain of the east bank of the Sagami River” has carried differing functions era by era. The river trade and the industrial park both rest, in the end, on the same site — the center of the Sagami plain. From a crossing inn to an inland industrial park, that site summoned, one after another, the functions. Note that the air base bearing Atsugi’s name lies, as a site, in the neighboring city area, and is not located within the city of Atsugi.